Marquis Bey's Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender is a collection of essays that explore the inherent carcerality of gender and the various ways Blackness subverts cisness. Bey homes in on the violence that is the assignation of gender and specifically discusses the coercive assignation as male at birth. The categorization of cisgender becomes a flattening label unfit to describe the wide array of embodiments that go beyond the cis normative presentations of gender. Bey builds on Jack Halberstam's anarchitecture as a method to wreck, unbecome, and batter the fortress of binary gender.
Bey's argument centers Blackness in anti-Blackness as they move toward illuminating whiteness as a necessary subtenant of cisgender. Blackness becomes a critique, a refusal, an inherent nonbinary-ness. Bey positions Blackness as “radical abolition of the violent tethers of the world” (27). Building on Hortense Spillers and her notion of ungendered Blackness, and pulling from their own...
